Wool and Wool-Based Textiles in the West European Economy, c.800 - 1500: Innovations and Traditions in Textile Products, Technology, and Industrial Organisation
Department of Economics and Institute for Policy Analysis
JEL Classification: F1, F2, F3, F4, H2, H3, J3, J5. K2, L1, L6, N2, N3, N4, N5, N6, N7, N8
This paper is a necessary companion to the one entitled The West European Woollen Industries and
their Struggles for International Markets, c.1000 - 1500. No one can properly comprehend that five-century
history of international competition for textile markets, without some basic understanding of the products that
the manufacturers sought to sell in seeking customers in those markets, and some understanding of the
changes in industrial organisation that enabled producers to market their products.
During these five centuries, West European textile producers marketed a very wide range of wool-based
textiles, classed under the general headings of woollens, worsteds, and semi-worsted ‘stuffs’. They
ranged in quality and price from relatively cheap – those that a master craftsmen could buy with two week’s
wages – to the ultra-luxurious woollen scarlets, aimed at aristocratic markets: extremely costly fabrics,
rivalling the best silks, whose purchase might cost a master mason several years’s wages. Wools, of course,
constituted the essential ingredient of all these fabrics, and certainly for luxury quality woollens, the most
expensive input, accounting for 60% - 75% of the cost of production, with other raw materials (oils, fullers’
earth, teasels, and dyestuffs, etc.) accounted for another 10%. To understand both the supply and demand
factors involved in marketing these textiles, the historian must clearly explain the economics of wool
production and of supplying other raw materials; and then the techniques involved in the manufacturing
processes: wool-sorting and preparation, combing, carding, spinning, weaving, and (for woollens), fulling
and felting, teaseling or napping, shearing, dyeing, and other finishing processes. The historian must then
demonstrate how the wools, dyestuffs, and manufacturing processes differed between and amongst the
various types of woollens, worsteds, and semi-worsted stuffs. To understand the marketing of these textiles,
the historian must also delineate the nature of product innovations (styles, colours, etc.) and then relate the
relative prices for these textiles to (1) the cost of a basket of essential consumable goods, and (2) the daily
wage-earnings of master craftsmen.
Underlying all these complex analyses lies a more fundamental question: a demonstration of Adam
Smith’s famous dictum‘That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market’. This paper
attempts to show how the expansion of internatio nal market networks from the 10
th
century transformed an
essentially rural domestic handicraft industry into a very complex, essentially-urban based industry, with a
very complex division of labour; and how market forces and supply factors brought about a veritable
‘industrial revolution’ in these text iles – in weavin g, carding, spinning, and fulling particularly – that, re lative
to the conditions of the medieval economy, were as important as the 18
th
-century Industrial Revolution in
cotton textiles. Somewhat surprisingly, this wool-based ‘industrial revolution’ was more or less complete by
the 15
th
century, thus leaving a technological hiatus until the 18
th
century.
The companion paper seeks to demonstrate, in terms of supply and demand models (but principally
a transaction cost model), how structural changes in the late-medieval economy centuries forced so many
textile-producers to forsake the export-oriented production of cheaper, lighter textiles to concentrate upon
the far higher-produced, much more luxurious heavy-weight woollens (whose durability would last several
lifetimes). The relevance of those market changes for technological change becomes clear when an
examination of the new industrial processes reveal that many of them, while cutting production costs, so
impaired quality that producers, competing in luxury markets, eschewed them for fear of losing customers.
The paper shows how urban guilds and governments imposed quality-controls, in acting as agents for
draperies engaged in monopolistic-competitio n, accepting some positive innovations, while rejecting others.
In contrast, the essence of the modern Industrial Revolution in textiles was in vastly improving quality, while
also cutting costs.